Jeremy J Schmidt

I’ve updated my research page with a quick blurb on my new book; now tentatively titled Normal Water.

The book itself is coming together nicely, and I anticipate completing it in a few more months. It will present a very different telling of water management – and of the  narrative arcs that are now common place in books about water. These narratives tend to begin with an appeal to the idea that water was once abundant, but has now become scarce and then, through mismanagement or environmental change, become an issue of security.

The book explains these kinds of narratives; their philosophical heritage and what they overlook. Then it offers something entirely different.

I have tried not to publish much on the book so that it doesn’t appear as one where it is just a mash of previous papers. That said, an article will appear next week in the journal Water Alternatives that includes a small part of one chapter. It won’t be possible to decipher the book’s main lines of arguments from it, but the historical work in that piece will provide some insight into how I view the problems with the heuristic devices now at work in many accounts of water management.